08/10/2013

"If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying the god, you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virute every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less."

-Socrates as recorded by Plato in the Apology

In his book, How
We Decide (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 2009),
Jonah Lehrer uses recent evidence from neuroscience to argue that
morality is not a matter of reason, but rather a matter of emotion.
Like Hume, who argued that reason was the slave of the passions and
argued morality to be but feelings of approval and disapproval,
Lehrer finds moral judgments as less a conscious deduction and more
an emotivistic response. In his argument, Lehrer primarily takes
Kant, and the Enlightenment tradition as his opponents, but he argues
that the ethical consensus for thousands of years from the Ten
Commandments to the categorical imperative are based upon a the
erroneous assumption that “our moral decisions are based on
rational thought” (How
We Decide,
pg. 173).

According
to Lehrer, when we make a moral judgment, the motivation for the
decision is not a rational deliberation, but rather a unconscious
emotional reaction. Within his vision of morality, our reason serves
not as a guiding light, but rather as a post-hoc apologist
which serves to make our emotional reactions seem reasonable. The
thrust of Lehrer's argument is thus that it is a mistake to find the source of morality in reason because
people's actual moral judgments are actually based on emotional reactions.

However,
all of this in turn misses the thrust of the Socratic maxim that a
life unreflected is a life not worth living. What Plato is
emphasizing in the Apology
through Socrates is not that at every single point in our moral lives
we make moral decisions based on deductive reasoning taking all of
the evidence into account, but rather that we can reflect on previous
moral decisions in order to shape our character to make better
decisions in the future. This perspective is echoed in Charles
Darwin's description of a moral being in The Descent of Man
as something that can reflect
back on past actions with either approval or disapproval.

Furthermore,
in the Nichomachean Ethics (trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd edition),
Aristotle finds virtue not in singular acts and feelings but a habit
of action that causes the person in question to perform her functions
well. Leaving aside the question of what the proper functions of a
human being are, this is a much different vision of morality from the
vision that is tacit within Lehrer's account in How We
Choose. To suggest, as Lehrer
does, that the essential use of reason in a moral agent's life comes
at the moment of decision making thus ignores a large strand of
ethical inquiry, from Aristotle to Darwin, that places more emphasis
on reflection and the cultivation of proper habits.

Rather than morality being about
singular judgments of the rectitude of an action, morality within
Plato and Aristotle's tradition of virtue ethics is about the
formation of a character able to habitually make the right decisions.
In a classic article in the American Journal of Psychology, “Habit,”
B.R. Andrews defined “Habit” as “a habit, from the
standpoint of psychology, is a more or less fixed way of thinking,
willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental
experience." (American Journal of Psychology,Vol. 14. No.
2. (1908) pp 121-149). Today, “Habit” is first defined in the
Oxford American English Dictionary as “A settled or regular
tendency or practice.” The point of a reflected life was not we
would be able to make deductive judgment for the propriety of each
action. Instead, it was that, by proper reflection, we would be able
to form a character that could reflexively make such decision based
on our habits.

The virtue-ethical
tradition does not reject that moral decisions are often made by
emotional responses within the moment;
instead, it teaches that we need to grow a virtuous character that
can make proper emotional responses informed by our previous
reflections. Rather than denying how moral decisions are made, as
does the Enlightenment tradition, it harnesses and improves upon it.
By living a life well reflected upon, we are able to train our moral
intuitions and shape our emotions to react in the ways that reason
determines to be right. The virtuous person then doesn't need to
deliberate on most moral decisions; rather, she has trained herself
to be able to react almost automatically in a proper manner. It is
not for no reason that Charles Darwin wrote, again in The
Descent of Man,that
the perfect moral being is able to act in the most noble manner
possible purely by reflex.

Explaining
this vision of the moral life in terms of neuroscience would have
been interesting, especially considering that Lehrer has an earlier
chapter about how in decision making ("The Predictions of Dopamine," pp. 28-56). When someone has consistently
repeated a pattern of behavior, he can rely on emotion in making that
decision because of how dopamine in the brain created expectations we
are often only partially to. This echoes the process that Aristotle wrote virtue is required in the opening of the Nichomachean Ethics' second book when he wrote:

Virtue, then, is of two sorts, virtue of thought and virtue of character. Virtue of thought arises and grows mostly from teching; that is why it needs experience and time [i.e., of ēthos] results from habits [ethos]; hence its name 'ethical', slightly varried from 'ethos'. (1103a15-18)

The similarities between the two are striking. Striking enough that I doubt Lehrer became familiar with the Aristotelean literature before opening up a broad-side assault on all of Western moral philosophy.

He misses a great opportunity, though. Since Aristotle relies on a metaphysical understanding of the human person, much of it rooted in his biological thought, within his writings that could be critiqued and improved upon with a modern understanding of the cognitive sciences. Lehrer could have helped provide that; instead, he simply launches on an attack of an entire tradition of inquiry he is not familiar with.

Moving backto the
main topic, that each moral judgment may rely more on an aesthetic
sense of the world than a rational deduction does not mean that moral
decision making is fundamentally divorced from reason. What
commentators like Lehrer, even though it may be working off of the
correct neuroscientific perspective, fail to take into account are
the lessons of the Classical virtue-ethical tradition. As taught by
Plato and Aristotle, the use of reason within moral decision making
is not a matter of on-the-spot decisions, but reflecting upon
previous decisions in order to make possible the gradual growth of a
habitual character that can make such on-the-spot decisions properly.
By ignoring both the role of habits and reason's reflective capacity,
not as simply something able to calculate but to look back on
actions, Lehrer's critique of reason in morality falls short by his
ignorance of virtue ethics.

10/09/2012

In
The Foundations of Scientific Inference
and in other places throughout his writings, the philosopher of
science, Wesley Salmon, provides a narrative about how scientific
induction can make sense out of a varying amount of facts to explain
the existence of ice sheets across much of North America. In this
narrative, it is the scientific capability to make imaginative
inferences from the facts to a theory about glaciers that made the
human mind capable of coming to the knowledge about about them. jm

Salmon is wrong, though,
in his narrative of why we know that glaciers once covered much of
North America. As a defender of induction in science, Salmon gives a
story about how we can see pieces of evidence that point to the
events of the Ice Ages and that from those pieces of evidence, our
confidence becomes greater that a continental ice sheet once extended
as far as Illinois. This all fits within his probabilistic
explanation of induction and within his thought, it certainly makes
sense how more evidence of that event would increase the scientific
robustness of a theory. However, that does not change that Salmon
fundamentally got the process backwards.

Physical objects in the world did not explain themselves to us
and people did not gather all of the evidence of the extent of the
Laurentide ice sheet and then come to create a theory about Ice Ages
from them. Instead, what happened is that the human idea that there
was such a thing as Ice Ages came to guide scientists into finding
more evidence to corroborate that theory. Facts did not lead to
theory; rather theory led to facts.

There are simply no such things as physical entities independent
of the ideas held by people that can be labeled “facts.” Indeed,
the common-place notion that there are such entities in the world and
that all someone has to do to discover the truth is to gather all of
these “facts” completely misconstrues the process by which human
knowledge grows. That human beings can even look at the world and say
there are such things as facts is a product of them holding theories
that allow them to categorize the world in such a way as to be able
to point towards otherwise epistemologically inert objects and to say
that they are “facts.” Thus facts occupy World Two of Karl
Popper’s ontology: facts only exist where the mind interacts with
the physical world and classifies it according to purely mental
objects (i.e. theories) that exist independent of the physical
world*.

Thus that we are able to see evidence everywhere we look that
point towards the existence of the Laurentide ice sheet cannot be
understood as simply facts guiding the mind towards adopting a
theory. Rather, we are able to see all of that evidence because the
human mind holds a certain theory and that theory makes possible the
mind to see those physical objects as pointing towards the existence
of primordial ice sheets tens of thousands of years ago.

Facts independent of theory thus don’t exist. All that exist
are physical objects that fit well into the classification schemes of
theories and some theories that have classification schemes that can
be seen as better capturing the real phenomena of the world. Some
classification schemes prove to be very capable at predicting how
future events can be classified, at which point we can say that they
have proved their mettle. And other schemes prove to be incapable of
predicting how future events can be classified, at which point we can
say that they have been classified. As a result, science is not
fitting theories to facts;
rather it is the competition of many different systems of
classification that bring along with them different understandings of
the physical objects out in the world.

* “In this pluralistic philosophy
consists of at least three ontological worlds: the first is the
physical world or the world of physical states; the second is the
mental world or the world of mental states; and the third is the
world of intelligibles, or of ideas in the objective sense;
it is the world of possible objects of thought: the world of theories
in themselves, and their logical relations; of arguments in
themselves and their logical relations; and of problem situations in
themselves.” - Karl Popper in “On the Theory of Objective Mind” as published in Objective Knowledge (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979), pg. 154.

10/08/2012

From essay I:23, “On Habit: and on
never easily changing a local law” by Michel Montaingne as
translated by M.A. Screech in Penguin Classic's The Complete
Essays:

Miraculous wonders
depend on our ignorance of Nature on the essence of nature, Our
judgment's power to see things is lulled to sleep once we grow
accustomed to anythings.

Similarly, Montaigne argued earlier in
I:23 that the reason that no one ever heart the music of the spheres
speculated by astronomers since the Greeks was that each person had
grown so accustomed to the sound that no one could consciously
discern it from the other sounds around them:

There is no need
to go in search of what is said about those who dwell near the
cataracts of the Nile; nor what the philosophers deduce about the
music of the spheres: so that those solid material circles rub and
lightly play against each other and so cannot fail to produce a
wondrous harmony (by the modulations and mutations of which are
conducted the revolutions and variations of the dance of the stars)
yet none of the creatures in the whole Universe can hear it, loud
though it is, since (as in the case of those Egyptians) our sense of
hearing has been dulled by the continuity of the sound.

The parallel with the Egyptians near
the banks of the cataracts not being able to hear the sound of the
roaring rapids was borrowed from Cicero's The Dream of Scipio
where Cicero also argues that the only reason no one hears the music
of the spheres is because no one has never not heard it so we have
all become dull to it.

Perhaps
there is something tragic in the power of familiarity. Whether it be
Angel Falls in Venezuela, the Grand Canyon, the red wood forests of
California, or the Great Barrier Reef, much of the wonder comes to
just how unaccustomed the onlooker is to what he sees. Everything in
life is compared to something else, this tree is taller than that
tree, this hole is deeper than that hole, and thus that something is
even considered a wonder implies that it is so much greater in some
quality than anything else in the world.

Angel
Falls is the highest uninterrupted fall, by the time that the water
reaches the bottom it has dispersed into a fine mist. The Great
Barrier Reef is the largest system of coral reefs in the world and
the largest single biological structure made by a single organism.
The onlooker is thus faced with something that they have never seen
before, a sight that breaks them from the habitual experiences they
are used to and that refuses to be ignored in the background.
However, as the onlooker grows accustomed to even the greatest sights
even they can fade into the background. Thus he can be lulled by the
force of habit to take things for granted and to not realize the
magnificent qualities of that which has waned into the mundane

There
is much lament in this human propensity, but to dwell too long on the
tragedy alone would be myopic. After all, even though the power of
familiarity may make us numb to the greatness around us, it also
serves to make human life bearable in even the most terrible of
circumstances. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune may be
shocking to a man accustomed to better, but before long they become
lost in the background. Habit then becomes
something to be grateful for, something that enables us to focus on
what is good in life rather than being lost in a sea of what we would
like to change.

09/22/2012

What is there to these letters now written upon this screen? They can certainly be described in terms of the characteristics of the particles that form them. They have a certain mathematical shape because of them and they take certain color due to the light that they reflect. If all we are going to do is to describe them by their physical traits based on the movement of particles, then that is where we must end. The letters now written would then be lines that happen to have certain physical properties. However, this does not get us anywhere close to what the letters really are.

The letters are not just lines. They are parts of words, clauses, sentences and even larger paragraphs all of which are organized in an order that cannot be expressed in the reductionist terms of moving particles. This order is not simply the motion of particles because such movement cannot have purpose and so we cannot speak of purpose in such terms.

Yet, the order that the letters form cannot be understood without purpose. Whether it be in the objects that the subject takes within each clause or even the purpose we presume that a similar entity like ourselves created by writing it. These cannot be understood in terms of moving particles and they point to substance in the world that cannot be reduced to moving particles: mind.

Every time we read a piece of writing, whether it be an article, book or even a humble blog post, we accept that there is more to the world than can simply be expressed in terms of moving particles. We accept that there is more to the writing than the mathematical properties of the lines they form. We accept that the lines express a conscious purpose that can only be expressed in terms of a mental substance and the traits only such substances can take.

There is more to a sentence than just moving particles: there is the non-reductionist order created by a mind within it that it cannot be understood without.